Navigate:

Republican group readies immigration blitz

Of the various conservative outside groups – American Crossroads, Americans for Prosperity and others – AAN may have had the best night on Nov. 6, when Republicans comfortably held onto the House of Representatives, where AAN and CLF trained their efforts.

In the months since then, the Republican Party has entered the early stages of a struggle to address the shortcomings that the 2012 campaign put on vivid display. Chief among those are the party’s grievously weak performance with nonwhite voters, and the failure of presidential nominee Mitt Romney and other GOP candidates to articulate an economic message that appeals to ordinary people.

Text Size

-

+

reset

AAN – and more specifically, HLN – took an early lead in that process by releasing a raft of polling showing that Hispanic voters view the GOP in intensely negative terms, and arguing that an immigration solution is a necessary first step toward building a more diverse voter base.

Longtime Republican fundraiser Fred Malek, who co-founded AAN with former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, said that the GOP is “increasingly viewed as intolerant and insensitive” to Hispanic voters.

“We haven’t addressed immigration reform in an intelligent and sensitive way, and until we do we can forget about the Hispanic vote,” Malek said.

Republican pollster Whit Ayres, the author of the HLN study on the party’s weakness among Hispanics, argued that there is an opening now to win popular support for immigration measures with voters who may have been more skeptical in the past.

“A lot of Republicans and center-right people have been persuaded that what we were doing in the past was not working and we need to do something different. What that different thing is remains to be seen,” Ayres said. “But there is real openness among people on the center-right proposals that they were not open to before the 6th of November.”

At least at this early stage, AAN’s advocacy isn’t touting specific provisions of immigration legislation or pushing for specific measures to be included or excluded from any bill. Instead, their goal is to make the argument that addressing the country’s immigration problems would be good for the economy and consistent with conservative principles – and to put a sympathetic face on arguments that more conservative voters rarely hear from their own side.

Informed strategists say AAN has realistic aspirations for bringing Hispanic voters into the GOP tent: moving immigration off the agenda may be a necessary step, but the party will have to wage a longer campaign to win over Hispanics even after immigration has been dealt with.

Whatever the time frame, Republicans say they are determined to tackle their party’s desperate underperformance with minorities, and do what it takes to avoid losing Hispanic voters by 44 points – as Romney did last year – in the future.

“We’ve got to be doing something about it, and that’s going to take a long, determined effort,” Walsh said. “We’ve got to start a conversation.”